“Theater is where I go to confront the hard stuff; to have my heart shredded there is O.K.” Laura Collins-Hughes writes of her recent encounters with Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday and Eurydice and how they helped her with her father’s decline and death from Parkinson’s disease.
Author: Matthew Westphal
What Carey Perloff Achieved In Her 25 Years Leading American Conservatory Theater (A Miracle, Basically)
“Her ability to make a go of ACT in the wake of dual disasters – the artistically uncompromising [founder Bill] Ball’s financial mismanagement and 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake, which partially collapsed and temporarily shuttered the palatial Geary Theater – looks downright miraculous even to her. … The story of those early years, particularly a riotous first season that included a picket by the Catholic Church and exercised critics and season subscribers alike, is now theatre lore.” Perloff talks to Richard Avila about how she did it and what she learned over the years, especially about being a woman running a major institution.
Is ‘Mother!’ Insane Enough To Be An Opera? Its Director Is Considering It
“In a new Reddit AMA with Darren Aronofsky, the director was asked by a commenter named chickenmagic (of course) if he considered staging his new movie as a play, to which he responded, ‘johan johansson and i are thinking about turning it into an opera.'” (Jóhannsson composed the score for the film.) This could make sense – indeed (as some have observed), it could make more sense than the movie does.
Marcel Proust Had Sock-Puppets Plant Good Reviews Of His Work
“The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers, letters by the great author reveal. The novelist wrote the notices himself and sent them to be typed up by his publisher ‘so there is no trace of my handwriting’ to distance himself ‘absolutely from the money that will change hands’.”
California School Board Resists Pressure, Declines To Ban Transgender Book From Kindergarten
“A Rocklin school board voted unanimously late Monday night to retain the policies that allowed a book about a transgender child to be read in kindergarten, but adopted a provision to forewarn parents of potentially controversial subject matter. The vote followed months of controversy that erupted over the book” – which was brought in by a transgender child – “being read at a Rocklin charter school’s story time.”
To Close Deficits, Met Opera Resorts To Staff Buyouts
“The Metropolitan Opera, which has continued to struggle at the box office and face what it calls ‘economic challenges,’ has offered voluntary buyouts to 21 of its 243 administrative employees.”
What Lyric Opera Of Chicago And The Joffrey Ballet Are Getting Out Of Their New Partnership
Chris Jones writes that the deal “is, at its core, an acknowledgment that it is no longer viable for even a world-class institution like the Lyric to sustain, maintain, operate and program a huge opera house entirely with productions of the repertory for which it was built.” But there’s more to it than that, Jones finds, and the benefits aren’t only about saving money.
When A Starchitect Designs A Major Project He Doesn’t Want You To Notice
David Chipperfield is doing a gut renovation of Berlin’s New National Gallery – designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – to, as a reporter puts it, “fix problems caused by age, as well as some that have plagued it since birth. … [He wants it] to perform as well as the most modern, assiduously climate-controlled and carefully lit museum – without any visitor noticing that he was ever there.”
The Hidden Museum: Tate St. Ives Doubles Its Space, But Where The Neighbors Can’t See
“In a deft feat of engineering, an almost 600-sq-metre space has been excavated into the hillside, chiselled 15 metres down into the granite bedrock, providing a vast light-flooded chamber for temporary exhibitions that the gallery has sorely needed for years.” Why take all that trouble? Because the residents of the tiny Cornwall town where the gallery is located absolutely hated the original expansion plan.
The Most Popular Theatre In Glasgow Serves Meat Pies And Beer (And No, It’s Not Playing ‘Sweeney Todd’)
“Scarcely past midday on a Monday lunchtime, a full 45 minutes before curtain up, the queue for the box office is already snaking on to the road. Inside Òran Mór, a spacious pub-cum-performance venue in Glasgow’s West End, the line of ticket holders is even longer. They are here for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, a lunchtime series launched by David MacLennan in 2004 and not so much a success as a phenomenon.”